Celebrating the 25 Days of Christmas ~ Activities List – Find a list of fun activities to do all during December!

Looking for Advent ideas? We have a big list of Advent Calendar Activities to help inspire you this year! My family is doing a special 25 Days of Christmas ideas for the month of December, where will do some sort of special activity or event for each day of the month leading to Christmas to celebrate the season of Advent. You can read all about the 25 Days of Christmas and see a variety of different Advent calendars that you can make yourself! Or just keep it really simple & have your kids help you make a red & green paper chain & you can write the activities on each of the links for the chain. Then have one child pull off a link each day with that day’s activity.

I’ve compiled all sorts of fun ideas of activities that you could do for your 25 Days of Christmas Activities or 12 Days of Christmas Activities. You can do however many days you want to do – 12 days, 5 days, or even just every few days!

Ideas for Advent Activities for Families:

Give each of your kids a chocolate Advent Calendar to use with your homemade advent calendar (you can find these at the Dollar store, Walgreens, Fred Meyer, World Market, Walgreens, Hallmark, Bed Bath & Beyond) *This is a great activity to do on December 1st

Living Nativity (check out our PNW Christmas Events list to see a few here in the Puget Sound area ) – great way to kick off the season of Advent & focusing on the true reason for the season!

Picnic next to the Christmas tree

Have a birthday party for Jesus & invite friends

Red & Green Dinner – serve food & drinks that are either red or green for dinner (if you’re really ambitious, you could even do this for every meal & make it Red & Green Day)

Make ornaments (I’ll be sharing some different ideas for these – check out these fun Salt Dough ornaments)

Christmas craft day (I’ll be sharing more ideas on the blog & Facebook Fan page)

Make homemade Peppermint Hot Chocolates or go out to Starbucks or a local coffee shop for a fun little outing to get a special Holiday flavored Hot Chocolate

Decorate Gingerbread Houses

Make candied popcorn & Game Night (maybe buy a new game & wrap it for them to open – it could be from a thrifty store, doesn’t have to be brand-new just new to them)

Giving/Service Ideas:

Gather allowance money & put in the Salvation Army bucket (or even better, volunteer as a bell ringer to help raise money for your local Salvation Army – we will be doing that this year again with our whole family – my girls had a blast doing this last year)

Have a shopping date with mom or dad to buy a gift for their sibling(s)

Bake & take cookies to a local organization like a nursing home, veteran’s home, hospital, youth center, etc

Bake cookies & bring to your local fire station (maybe they’ll even give you a tour of the station & the trucks)

Make gifts or treats for the neighbors & deliver them together

Gather up toys to donate (also clears the way for new toys coming at Christmas)

Make Christmas gifts for teachers

Adopt a family or a child for the Christmas season – thru Toys for Tots or a local angel/giving tree – have your children help you shop for the items

Go Christmas caroling in your neighborhood or at a local nursing home, hospital, rehab center

If any of your activities involve something you will give to your kids, you could wrap those up to correspond with the appropriate date. This just adds to the anticipation and fun for them! A few examples of items you could wrap up are: chocolate Advent Calendar, Christmas PJ’s, wrap a new Christmas book or movie that you’ll read or watch as a family, a new play Nativity set, or wrap up the fixins’ for popcorn & movie night.

Random Acts of Kindness Activities:

A really cool idea too, that you could do for any length of time – a few days here & there, 5 days in a row or more would be to turn your Advent Activities into “Random Acts of Christmas Kindness”. This is where you pick an activity to do something nice for someone! You could call it the 25 Days of Giving Ideas! I love this idea! Last year, we added this day into our 25 Days of Christmas Ideas. This is basically like a Pay it forward kind of day. You look for opportunities to pay it forward – so we bought the coffee for the person behind us at Starbucks, we gave the Target cashier a Target gift card, and any other opportunities that we came across to do something totally random during the day.

Hopefully this gets you a good start on ideas that you could include in your 25 Days of Christmas! Now, it’s your turn – we’d love to hear what type of fun activities you like to do as a family to celebrate the Christmas season?

Comments

We have our 25 socks strung across the fireplace and ready for the “elves” to deliver something tonight in each one of them for a countdown to Christmas. We love to go to Snowflake Lane in Bellevue, hand out special gifts to all our neighbors, cut down a tree and decorate, buy toys and other things for Toys for Tots and other organizations and bake some cookies for teachers and others.

Love these ideas and love the whole 25 days idea. We’re doing something similar this year, just not quite as organized. I’m just adding a few ideas each week to my planner (crafts, baking cookies, etc). There are so many things we want to do this month and it just flies so quickly by!

just wanted to say thank you so much for all the wonderful ideas I have been looking for a diy advent calender and havent found anything I like but I love these ideas thanks again Merry Christmas and God bless!!

We always like to volunteer for Toys for Tots every year. If you can volunteer the Marines could always use helpers and anybody can help. It’s fun to take the whole family to help out, it gives the kids a chance to see how much they actually have and be grateful for it.